Western publishers are launching a drive to tap the Arab world for new stars, hoping to bridge the language gap with more than 200 million native Arabic speakers - and make money from selling books.

Bloomsbury announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair yesterday that it is to launch a new Arabic-language publishing house, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, in partnership with the Gulf state. "The emphasis so far in Qatar has been on literacy, and our second challenge is how to move from literacy to literature to create a culture," said Abdel-Rahman Azzam, a spokesman for Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, the emir's consort and the chair of the Qatar Foundation.

The venture hopes to find new talent to build on the success of Egypt's Alaa Al-Aswany's novel The Yacoubian Building, which is an international bestseller.

Azzam said the Arabic literary world was on the cusp of a boom similar to that enjoyed by India, home of this year's Booker prize winner, Aravind Adiga.

Western interest in Arabic literature has been growing despite a paucity of published new works. Arabic is the fifth-most spoken language worldwide, with 206 million native speakers. Many feel that globalisation and the domination of English have negatively affected their native tongue. But Gulf oil and gas wealth - and the competitive urge to create and buy signature international brands - has opened up possibilities.

Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates's capital, announced earlier this week that it was launching a regional multimedia centre to train, develop and promote Arab talent in journalism, broadcasting, film-making and publishing. Random House and Harper Collins are also setting up offices in the city.

Earlier this year the Emirates Foundation launched a $50,000-literary prize, which was won by the Egyptian author Baha Taher, to help boost the international profile of literary fiction in Arabic.

Last year another Abu Dhabi-based foundation, Kalima ("word" in Arabic) announced plans to translate 500 great books from 16 languages into Arabic by 2010. These included works by Stephen Hawking and Haruki Murakami. Four years ago, a UN report identified a lack of translated foreign works as an issue restricting Arab intellectual life. The report noted that in one year Spain translates the same number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years.

Arab-western collaboration is the key. This year's London Book Fair, helped by the British Council, focused on the Arab world. "The counterpoint to the ongoing wars of aggression and the drumbeat heralding a 'clash of civilisations' is the desire of ordinary people in the west and in the Arab world to engage with each other," the Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif said at the time.

The Bloomsbury list will focus on fiction and non-fiction for adults and children, educational books, and classics of Arabic literature as well as reference books.

"The Yacoubian Building shows how big the market can be [for Arabic books] in England and America," said Bloomsbury's chief executive, Nigel Newton.

· This article was amended on Thursday October 16 2008 to delete a reference to Afghanistan-born Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, who is not an Arab.